The Moderating Effect of Knowledge Integration on the Relationship between Social Capital and Open Innovation

The study explores the relationship between social capital (SC) and open innovation (OI) performance. Target population of this study consists of technology-based firms in Malaysian context. Specifically, the study sought to examine the moderating role of knowledge integration (KI) in the relationship between SC and OI performance. The complete paper will provide new insights from the SCT into OI studies, an approach which may support an increased contribution of external knowledge to a firm’s OI Performance

A pilot case study of open innovation in a Brazilian company

Open innovation represents a powerful competitive aspect not only in developed countries but also in emerging economies. In this context, this paper aims at demonstrating some aspects of the introduction of an open innovation program in a company in Brazil. A unit of analysis that produces cosmetics was selected due to its practices of innovation management, which is considered as a benchmark in the country. Case-based research was used as the methodological approach. Data were collected mostly by document analysis but some questions were answered by electronic mail to construct a case description. The company performs activities related to scientific and technological as well as market knowledge. The organization applies the concept of open innovation since the 90’s and has increased its activity since then. This paper describes the open innovation program and discusses aspects of drivers and success factors for external collaborations. Results show that an infra-structure for innovation in addition to the initiatives of open innovation support company performance. There are also multiple ways of collaborations such as cooperation, co-creation, co-design, services, consulting, financing, etc. Conclusively, the results have found ground to the existing literature in the subject at some exten

Online Leadership for Open Source Project Success: Evidence from the GitHub Blockchain Projects

Blockchain technology has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, only 8% of blockchain open source projects are maintained actively on GitHub. Drawing on the online leadership literature, this study seeks to understand the correlation between leader characteristics and success of blockchain open source projects from the behavioral (knowledge contribution), structural (social capital) and cognitive (openness orientation) dimensions. Considering the unique decentralization nature of blockchain, this study further investigates the contingency effect of blockchain archetypes with empirical evidence from GitHub. Our findings provide novel insights for understanding the determinants of blockchain open source project success and leadership behaviors in the online community

Instructors as Designated Leaders for Fostering Online Engagement: The Case of Online Learning Communities

With the increasing need to understand pedagogy online, but also with the understanding that the role of designated leaders in online communities has not been examined, the paper presents a study that aims to examine how instructors in online learning platforms may impact, through their presence, participants’ online engagement. The theoretical foundations of the study are based on a typology of different types of leaders’ presence in the online context. In this research in progress paper, the research design of the study is described and expected contributions in the areas of online communities and eLearning are identified

PROMOTING GOOD MANAGEMENT: GOVERNANCE, PROMOTION, AND LEADERSHIP IN OPEN COLLABORATION COMMUNITIES

While we do have an idea of what the leadership of open collaboration communities is responsible for at a high level, we have little knowledge of what these leaders actually do. Similarly, in an online context we understand pieces of the process managers and leaders go through to be elected, but their change in behavior once they become a manager remains unexplored. What behaviors do these leaders engage in that is different from a typical contributor to the community? How can we empirically distinguish which behaviors are characteristic of a successful leader vs. an unsuccessful leader? We examine leadership promotion and performance in Wikipedia, a prominent open collaboration community. This study extends previous work on governance and leadership by developing and validating a more complete measurement model of leadership performance in an open collaboration community, and proposing a testable model of leadership promotion and performance within this context

Boundary Spanning in Academia: Antecedents and Near-Term Consequences of Academic Entrepreneurialism

Analyzing the pathways of people who earned interdisciplinary research doctorates in the United States in 2010, we generate three main findings while controlling for gender, ethnicity, discipline, and age. First, individuals who complete an interdisciplinary dissertation display near-term income risk since they tend to earn nearly $1,700 less in the year after graduation. Second, students whose fathers earned a college degree demonstrated a .8% higher probability of pursuing interdisciplinary research. Third, the probability that non-citizens pursue interdisciplinary dissertation work is 4.7% higher when compared with US citizens. Our findings quantify the risks of interdisciplinary work and contribute to policy debates

Encouraging Collaborative Idea-Building in Enterprise-Wide Innovation Challenges

Innovation challenges are increasingly adopted for idea generation in inter- and intra-firm innovation to elicit novel solutions from employees to strategic and business-related problems of the firm. However, the current idea-oriented approach is limited in leveraging the full capacity of open innovation, as it focuses more on identifying the best ideas through competition rather than generating new idea through participants’ recombination and integration of their expertise. We argue that the capabilities of innovation challenges can be fully leveraged when participants engage in collaborative interactions during innovation challenges. We propose the notion of “collaborative challenge,” denoting innovation challenges in which individual participants behave in ways that foster knowledge integration across diverse ideas

Serial Integration, Real Innovation: Roles of Diverse Knowledge and Communicative Participation in Crowdsourcing

Despite a burgeoning public and scholarly interest on open innovation and crowdsourcing, how to enable members of online temporary crowd to maintain knowledge integration and innovation remains underexplored. This study seeks to understand the ways in which online crowd members collectively generate more innovative and serial integrative solutions to crowdsourced open innovation challenges. Analyzing 3,200 unique posts generated by 486 participants of 21 organization-sponsored online crowdsourcing innovation challenges, this research demonstrates that crowd members contribute more innovative solutions when being exposed to explicitly shared diverse knowledge, and that crowd members’ communicative participation acts as a catalyst for the production of both innovation and serial knowledge integration. Findings suggest that managers who seek to generate knowledge integration and innovation should endeavor to implement systems that afford high-level communicative participation, as well as encourage crowd members to make their diverse knowledge explicit while minimizing their cognitive load in knowledge sharing

A Comparison of Evaluation Networks and Collaboration Networks in Open Source Software Communities

The open source software (OSS) development communities have experienced rapid growth in recent years. Previous social network studies on OSS communities focused on collaboration relationships. However, information about how OSS community members perceive each other is largely ignored. In this study, we report an empirical investigation of the evaluation network in an online OSS community which includes over 11,800 OSS projects and more than 94,330 developers. A collaboration network is modeled from this data set and analyzed for comparison purposes. We find the evaluation network is significantly different from collaboration network in average degree, average path length and fragmentation rate. Furthermore, we argue that the evaluation networks can be used to locate expertise - skillful developers in OSS communities and capture important social relationships among the developers missed in the collaboration network. These characteristics of the evaluation network may benefit the research of OSS development communities and expert recommendation systems